Colloquium: A Fresh Start Country
Paul Cantor
If America has represented any one thing to the world over the years, it has been the idea of a fresh start. From the earliest explorations of Christopher Columbus to the Revolutionary War and the founding of a new political order in the United States Constitution, America has been associated with the discovery of a New World and the dawning of a new era in human history. To generations of immigrants from all over the globe, the United States has held out the prospect of escaping the oppressive politics and grim economic prospects of their homelands and achieving a fresh start in a new land.
American history itself has been a series of fresh starts, embodied in a series of Great Awakenings and the continuing westward movement of its frontiers. The spirit of a fresh start has permeated American culture, giving it its special vitality, in such popular forms as the novel in the nineteenth century and the motion picture in the twentieth.
This colloquium will investigate the notion of America as a fresh start country in a variety of ways and a variety of media. We will look at the issue historically by reading Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History, the most famous exposition of the idea that the United States kept offering fresh starts to its people by expanding its borders westward. We will also read Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a book that imaginatively finds the spirit of America in the world of childhood, and thereby turns out to be one of the most powerful evocations of the fresh start idea in American literature. We’ll also view John Ford’s Stagecoach, one of the greatest of all Western movies and an epic celebration of America as a fresh start nation. Other readings will explore science and technology as new frontiers in twenty-first century America.
Paul Cantor is Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is best-known for his work on Shakespeare, but in recent years, he has published on Alexis de Tocqueville, Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, and a wide range of subjects in American popular culture, from film noir to The Simpsons. His Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2001 by the LA Times.